Various designs of cassettes for coin changers having various coin stores for payout have been proposed. The coin stores are sized to accept a certain diameter of coin and several are associated with the cassette to store coins of particular varieties. Several coin stores of the same size may be associated with a single cassette to increase the storage capacity of coins of that size.
In the past, cassettes have been manufactured that are permanently configured to incorporate coin stores of certain diameters. Other cassettes have been manufactured to incorporate removable coin stores that allow the coin stores to be replaced with a coin store of a different diameter. Reconfiguring the diameter of a coin store, and hence the denomination of coin that it will contain, requires the coin changer to be reconfigured in order that it may accurately calculate the change to be given a customer. The reconfiguration can be manual or automatic.
A removable cassette for a coin changer is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,400,891. The cassette has coin storage modules that are retained in the cassette. However, no coin storage module can be removed from the cassette until the cassette has been removed from the coin changer. This represents a deficiency in the prior art as it would be simpler for a technician to have the capability to remove and replace the coin stores while the cassette was attached to coin changer.